> If there are 100 possible technical solutions to a given computing problem, the ones that solve the problem more comprehensively are naturally going to tend to be more complex, this complexity comes with an adoption cost, and that cost works against the likelihood of adoption.
The opposite is true. The best solutions are simple, not complex. Piling features one on top of other features to solve every problem as you encounter it gets you started faster than first thinking carefully about the problem space and then designing a solution. That's worse is better, or better: worse is quicker.
Stating that as an absolute truth is extremely naive. The cases for which that is true are the easy ones, you are very lucky if you have the choice to limit your work to things which have simple and elegant solutions. Most things that touch the real world have an irreducible complexity that you can't simplify with destroying the core value proposition: witness Unicode.
Sure, but that's not what we are talking about here. Given two solutions that solve the same problem, the simpler one is almost always the better one. A worse is better methodology produces a complex and worse solution, whereas you were saying that it produces a simple and worse solution.
And by the way, CSS is definitely not complex because of irreducible complexity.
But coming up with a simple solution takes much longer than coming up with a complicated one; and by the time you've come up with your simple elegant solution, your competitor has already beaten you to market with something worse but was actually "good enough" and no one cares about your solution. Worse is better is not a methodology, but an observation.
I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter. Blaise Pascal
Plus, I had to be done in ten days or something worse than JS would have happened. Brendan Eich
The opposite is true. The best solutions are simple, not complex. Piling features one on top of other features to solve every problem as you encounter it gets you started faster than first thinking carefully about the problem space and then designing a solution. That's worse is better, or better: worse is quicker.